In Mexico, a new murder mystery

By Tom Henheffer - Thursday, October 1, 2009 at 5:40 PM - 9 Comments

Renee Wathelet quit her job as an investment counsellor and moved to the island paradise of her dreams—Isla Mujeres, Mexico—last May. Every morning, she would sit on the sandy beach, listening to waves and thinking about her friends back home in Montreal. It was exactly how the 60-year-old grandmother wanted to spend her twilight years.

Last week, she was found dead in her condo, her throat slit and her body stabbed multiple times. Continue…

No wonder the Kennedys hated him

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, September 10, 2009 at 5:20 PM - 35 Comments

Dominick Dunne died the day after Ted Kennedy, and so his passing went all but unnoticed, coming as it did just as the American media’s week-long orgasmic frenzy of Camelotian prostrations and ululations was getting into gear. Dunne would have accepted the black jest of bad timing, albeit with regret. The Kennedy family blames him for the present woes of their cousin, Michael Skakel, currently banged up in the big house for a long-ago murder of a 15-year-old girl who had the misfortune to live next door. “Dominick Dunne,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told New York magazine, “is a pathetic creature.”

“I don’t give a f–k about what that little s–t has to say,” Dunne responded. “That f–king asshole.” Continue…

Hungary’s Roma protect themselves

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, September 10, 2009 at 3:40 PM - 7 Comments

Hungary’s Roma population is so afraid of attacks by right-wing groups that they have started protecting their neighbourhoods through nighttime patrols. Their fear is justified: six Roma have been murdered in violent assaults since last November. After a huge police investigation, four men, alleged Roma haters who carefully planned their crimes, were detained for the deadly attacks in late August.

One of the worst attacks occurred in Tatárszentgyörgy last February. Erzsebet Csorba woke up to the sound of gunfire outside her house. She discovered her mortally wounded son not far from his firebombed house. Her grandson was nearby. “His whole small body was full with holes from the bullets,” she told Voice of America. The child soon died. Continue…

Millionaire murder

By Nicholas Kohler and Rachel Mendleson - Thursday, September 3, 2009 at 1:20 PM - 11 Comments

Ryan Alexander Jenkins last showed up in Calgary in early June and found himself strangely alone. For several months he had been travelling back and forth between Calgary, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, where he had just completed filming a reality television program. “I think he came back without a lot of friends,” says an old drinking buddy, Chris Tutty, who, like Jenkins, is both a realtor and an aspiring actor. “It was almost like he was following me around to different places where I was at, casually running into me and buying me drinks.”

In fact, Jenkins wanted badly to talk. His relationship with 28-year-old Jasmine Fiore, the Las Vegas model he’d married in March, only days after meeting her, was in trouble. “He was saying that he was just being used and lied to and that everyone was making fun of him,” says Tutty. Tutty did not think much of Fiore, whom he’d met at a private party in the spring during one of her visits to Canada with Jenkins. And he had reason to be skeptical of his friend’s professed feelings for the woman he still called his wife: Jenkins was working the Living Room—a trendy Calgary hotspot—collecting telephone numbers from the buxom blonds he had always found so irresistible. “He was like a hawk that had seen his prey,” says Michelle Hull, one woman who met his criteria that night. “He said that he had an open relationship,” says Tutty. “I laughed at that one.” Continue…

How Thatcher got his book deal

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, April 30, 2009 at 10:40 AM - 1 Comment

It’s been 26 years since the murder of JoAnn Wilson, shot and bludgeoned in the garage of her Regina home, and the case has never really gone away. Her death was followed by a 15-month police investigation, the arrest of her ex-husband Colin Thatcher (son of a former Saskatchewan premier and an ex-provincial cabinet minister himself), a sensational trial and conviction, books and a CBC TV movie, and seemingly endless appeals and requests for early release. But even Thatcher’s parole in late 2006 didn’t bring an end to one of the highest-profile murder cases in Canadian history—as Jack David, publisher of ECW Press, learned last year when he received a letter.

Now 70 and living on his ranch near Moose Jaw, Sask., Thatcher has never ceased proclaiming his innocence, and he’s not about to stop now. He offered ECW a look at Final Appeal: Anatomy of a Frame, a title that says it all. David, “curious to start, and skeptical,” took that look and read a manuscript he describes as “well supported and pretty well written. I was intrigued by it, and tried to weigh its merits.” In the end, David—who has published controversial books before, notably Benoit, about the Canadian wrestler who killed himself, his wife and their young son—opted to publish, and will release the book in September.

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USA Stat of the Day

By Andrew Potter - Monday, December 29, 2008 at 3:20 PM - 5 Comments

In 2000, 539 white and 851 black juveniles committed murder, according to an analysis of federal data by the authors. In 2007, the number for whites, 547, had barely changed, while that for blacks was 1,142, up 34 percent.

link.

Megapundit: The meaning of Jim Prentice

By selley - Friday, October 31, 2008 at 2:35 PM - 7 Comments

Must-reads: Christie Blatchford on the David Frost trial; Colby Cosh on what to do with murderers; Richard Gwyn on the global economy; Dan Gardner on young jihadis; Lorne Gunter on Tasers; Susan Riley on the cabinet shuffle.

Brave new world?
With Stephen Harper’s cabinet successfully shuffled, it’s time to play cards.

The Globe and Mail‘s Jeffrey Simpson seems fairly pleased by Harper’s choices, calling Steven Fletcher’s promotion “heartwarming” and well-deserved, appreciating the redeployment of Peter Van Loan and John Baird to less partisan positions and suggesting if anyone can strengthen the Conservatives’ woeful climate change plan, it’s probably Jim Prentice. His one lament is that the cabinet “contains not a single multicultural Canadian, despite the impressive Conservative gains in some of those communities.” (This seems a tad unfair to Bev Oda, we have to say.)

The National Post‘s John Ivison likens the new dream team to “a Volvo—safe and reliable but not particularly sexy,” and designed to instil confidence in its owners (i.e., Canadians). He didn’t promote anyone “beyond their level of competence or experience,” in other words, and “prudence” was the guiding principle for the major portfolios that got shuffled. Ivison doesn’t quite buy the party spin on Prentice’s appointment, however—i.e., that “his reward for having done a good job in a difficult portfolio, is another difficult portfolio.” He’s “said to be unhappy with the move,” for one thing, and “reduce[ing] emissions without harming the energy industry” is less “difficult” than it is “impossible.” Ivison still believes Prentice’s leadership ambitions, or Harper’s perceptions thereof, played a role.

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